https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9040-4185
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ABSTRACT
Hate crimes have increased in frequency and types of crimes covered, drawing attention to state hate crime statutes. However, hate crime statutes are vague and inconsistent throughout the United States. Variation causes many Americans to no have legal protection against hate crimes and leads to underreporting of hate crimes. Due to this, victims differ in their legal protections, which causes arbitrary outcomes of justice. To evaluate the state of hate crime legislation, this study is a content analysis of all applicable hate crime statutes in the 50 states in the United States, and relevant themes were identified. The general theme of inconsistency was found in conceptualization, protected class and locations, official justice system responses, and victims’ services. Hate crime statutes need improvement which can be accomplished by states mirroring other effective statutes and by legislative action from the federal government.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. Identity politics, in this context, refers to the tendency for people to form exclusive political alliances based on self-selection by race, religion, gender, social background, social class, or other identifying factors and differs from traditional broad-based political politics.
2. While it is beyond the scope of this paper to describe the design of the entire US legal system, the bulk of criminal prosecutions occur at the state level. This leads to having 50 separate systems (in addition to the federal system), but all must follow the same constitutional restrictions, leading to general similarities. As this paper highlights, these are similarities only, and not 50 identical sets of laws. To add to the variations in laws and their enforcement, there are over 18,000 police departments in the USA, and the majority of all hate crimes are brought to the attention of the courts by police.
3. It is worth noting that these protections are only guaranteed to citizens, which in a pluralistic society leaves a lot of individuals without protection.
4. At the time of this writing, one other state (Georgia §17-10-17) has pass hate crime legislation, which is not included in these analyses.
5. The United State Department of Justice maintains a current list of states that offer hate crime protections based on protect persons based on their 1) race/color, 2) national origin, 3) religion, 4) sexual orientation, 5) gender/sex, 6) gender identity, and 7) disability.